Tag: Department of Justice

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last month that it now has hired 326 immigration judges, 53 more judges than July 2016, yet during that time the immigration court backlog has grown. According to new data released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) the reason for this may be due to the fact that […]

In the first week of his presidency, through executive orders, the president laid out harsh proposals for immigration enforcement and border security. However, much of what the president proposes to do requires generous amounts of taxpayer dollars allocated by Congress. In May, the president submitted a proposed budget which provides record levels of funding for […]

The House of Representatives unveiled their Fiscal Year 2018 budget for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this week, which allocates $1.6 billion to begin construction of a border wall along the entire Southern border with Mexico. However, being provided the funds is not enough to complete the project. To achieve a complete and uninterrupted border […]

Anyone familiar with the immigration system knows that the immigration courts have an enormous backlog which has persisted—and grown—for more than a decade. As of April 2017, the immigration court backlog topped 585,930 cases, more than double the pending cases in fiscal year (FY) 2006 (212,000). The immigration court backlog means that many people wait […]

President Trump reignited discussion around his controversial travel ban through a series of early morning tweets on Monday, in a move legal experts say could ultimately cripple his administration’s chances of restoring the ban through the Supreme Court. In these tweets, the president blew a giant hole in his legal case when he insisted that his […]

While campaigning for office, then-candidate Trump threatened to punish so-called sanctuary cities by defunding them. Soon after his inauguration, he released an executive order on interior enforcement. The order partially focused on getting local officers to become force multipliers by assisting federal immigration agents in the identification, detention, and deportation of immigrants. The president’s order […]

On Wednesday, a federal court in Seattle issued a nationwide temporary restraining order allowing nonprofits to continue to provide limited legal assistance to immigrants without being forced to formally represent them in immigration court. The order was issued in a lawsuit brought by the Northwest Immigrants Right Project (NWIRP) after it received a “cease and […]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried drug dealers and armed cartels at the U.S.-Mexico border on Tuesday, but rather than announcing a crackdown on those elements, he instead declared war on undocumented immigrants and those who defend them. Sessions announced that he was instructing U.S. Attorneys to prioritize criminal immigration enforcement around the country as opposed […]

The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division recently issued a final rule, effective January 18, to update regulations that the agency uses to enforce employment-related anti-discrimination provisions that Congress included in the “unfair immigration-related employment practices” section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The agency maintains that the update clarifies the procedures […]

For more than a decade, the immigration court system has struggled with an enormous backlog. The latest figures from (TRAC) record the backlog at an all-time high of 521,676 as of the end of October, the first month in Fiscal Year (FY) 2017. The data release coincides with reports of President-Elect Donald Trump’s plan for […]